


The Facts About Jimmy

by zjofierose



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, BAMF Uhura, Bones is an enabler, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, Jim Kirk acting out, M/M, Not Happy, incestuous friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-08
Updated: 2011-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:11:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose





	1. Chapter 1

_**The Facts About Jimmy**_  
 **Title:** The Facts About Jimmy  
 **Universe/Series:** AU (modern-day [well, early-mid 90s] in my head, but it's not really important.)  
 **Rating:** NC-17  
 **Relationship status:** yeah, that's complicated  
 **Genre:** h/c, angst  
 **Trope** : ummm.... no idea.  
 **Warnings:** language, in spades. sex.  
Pairing: k/s, k/m, and vague suggestions of k/u  
 **Beta** : thanks to [](http://medea-fic.livejournal.com/profile)[**medea_fic**](http://medea-fic.livejournal.com/) for being unfailingly amazing  
 **Summary** : bones is always there whenever jim needs him to be. whether it's good for either of them is really anybody's guess.  
 **A/N** : based off of [this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dp6y50lu0I), which i have loved since i was a kid growing up in the corn. [lyrics here](http://www.lyrics007.com/Shawn%20Colvin%20Lyrics/The%20Facts%20About%20Jimmy%20Lyrics.html), if you want an idea of where this may end up going.  
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I can hear that god-awful putt-putt-putt of his perpetually dying bike coming up the drive before I see the cloud of dust rising over the fields. Christ. It’s not even dinnertime yet. I knock back what’s left of my drink, the last chunk of ice hitting my back tooth and making me hiss in discomfort as I swallow the burn down.

 **  
**

Dealing with Jim is easier when I’m more than a little buzzed.

 

“Bones! Fuck, _Bones_ , where the hell are you?”

 

I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, smear it down the side of my jeans. There’s dirt enough already, rum’ll never show.

 

“Out back!”

 

He slams his way through the double-wide, no finesse, that boy, just energy, always energy, burning out and burning hot. The screen door bangs and then he’s there on the stoop, his eyes burning a hole in my back before I even turn around.

 

I tip my glass upside down, the last drops of liquid falling to earth in a perfect line, puffing into the dirt with more finality than I’ve ever found in life.

 

I turn.

 

He’s been at Nyota’s already, it’s clear. I could smell her perfume on him from here, even if I couldn’t see the lipstick on his collar and the handprint blooming on his cheek. He’s well past drunk and into shitfaced, and if he hadn’t been piloting that goddamn bike in much worse shape since he was old enough to reach the clutch, I’d be worried.

 

“Jim.”

 

Just his name’s enough, and he’s over the edge, tears streaming down his cheeks as his face turns red, then purple, then white under his tan. He chokes once, and he’s doing that thing where he forgets to breathe, so I step forward, one step, two, and then he’s hard up against me, his fists tearing at my shirt as he rubs snot into my collar.

 

“God almighty, Jim, motherfuckin _let go_ of me for one goddamned _second_ , can you?”

 

He can’t, but I manage to manhandle him back up the trailer steps. We slam down the tiny hallway, ricocheting off the particle-board walls as I try vainly to pull our trajectory into something resembling deliberate. He’s got my shirt off and my belt undone before we make it to the bedroom, and I nearly take us both down when my pants fall to my ankles. I trip, and manage to fall onto the bed instead of next to it, grasping desperately at the sheets as he yanks my BVDs down to my kneecaps in one practiced motion.

 

Jesus. If I’d known he was coming, I’d be a hell of a lot drunker than this.

 

He’s on my dick before I can catch my breath, his mouth hot and tight and full of way too many teeth for this to feel good, but it doesn’t matter, it never has. It takes no more than a minute and I’m coming hard, my cock clenching furiously in response to Jim’s own special kind of penance. I hear him gasp loudly once, twice, three times as I lay there trying to catch my breath, and I wonder if he’s even bothered to pull down his briefs before he came.

 

My eyes are closed, but I feel it when he hauls himself up the bed to lie next to me, flopping out limply on the mattress, not touching, in deference to the unbearable heat. We lie in silence for a moment, too fucked out to move, to speak, to make any pretence at happiness.

 

“The papers came today.”

 

His voice is low, composed, and utterly bereft.

 

“ _Fuck_.”

 

He laughs, the sound completely unconvincing. “Eloquent as always, Bones” he murmurs, and I reach out to clutch his hand, winding my dry fingers through his.

 

“You gonna sign them?”

 

Silence, then a sigh.

 

“What else can I do, Bones? It’s what he wants. Or says he wants. And, _shit_ , Bones, we both know that I’ve never been able to tell him no.”

 

There’s nothing I can say to that. It’s God’s own truth; where Spock is concerned, Jim is a one-word man, and that word has always been “ _yes_ ”.

 

I reach out to the nightstand, fumble around blindly till I find my pack of smokes and the lighter. Shove the business end in my mouth and flip the cap, the reassuring flare of the zippo bright in the late-afternoon gloom. Take a deep drag, letting the cancerous fumes waft through my alveoli, blowing out to let the haze of smoke rise and circle the ceiling fan.

 

“Those’re gonna kill you, Bones. Gonna make you die.”

 

He’s got his face all pressed into the pillow, my pillow, smearing snot and tears and spit into my good floral pillowcase, but I can’t muster the energy to care.

 

I take another drag.

 

“We’re all gonna die, Jimbo. We’re all gonna die.”

 

He snorts. “Optimistic, for a doctor.”

 

“Realistic.”

 

There’s a long pause. My cigarette is mostly ash, and I’m wondering if he’s fallen asleep yet or not. Thunder rolls in the distance, and a breeze moves through the dingy curtains for what seems like the first time in years.

 

“What am I gonna _do_ , Bones?”

 

I look at him lying there, bare freckled back to the ceiling, and my heart twists inside me. I love him, I always have, but the feeling between us falls so far short of that nuclear blast that is the love between him and Spock. I made my peace long ago.

 

“Do you still love him?”

 

The “always” is mumbled, but unmistakable. I ash my cigarette one last time, then crush it hard into the dish.

 

“Go see him, Jim. Go find him, and tell him you can’t do it.”

 

Thunder rolls again, closer this time, and the smell of rain is on the air.

 

“Is it really that simple, Bones?”

 

There’s an itch on my scalp and a thirst in my throat, but I close my eyes and slide down next to him, kicking my pants off my ankles as I go.

 

“No.” I roll over, my back to him. “But you’re gonna do it anyway.”

 

 


	2. What's Done is Done

Nyota's long fingers are slender on her glass, and it's a damn crying shame that she and I never could hit it off quite right. We'd tried once; her all long and slick and me all hard and tense, drunk off our asses some time when Jim and Spock had been reunited after the inevitable butt-fuck of a misson gone wrong again. We couldn't get the rhythm right; she's all slide where I'm all shove, all lick where i'm all bite. We laughed it off in the end and finished the bottle of whatever fuck-all we were drinking, giving it up for a bad job. Now we're just friends, caught together in a degrading orbit.

 _Damn_ fucking shame, though. That woman could give a campfire lessons in how to smoulder.

We're all a little older now, a little worse for wear, even her, our ever-glib queen. Her tongue may be talented yet, but her manicure is chipping in a way she would never have allowed ten years ago. Her eyes are red, her earrings gone, and I know she's been with Jim.

"How is he?"

She sighs, her eyes focused on some distant point. Raises the rim of the glass to her mouth and drinks, the swallow rolling down her throat in elegant reflex. I pause a moment to give that wonder of a bottom lip its due.

"Not good, Len." The wine in her glass has legs not nearly as good as hers, but she swirls it contemplatively before continuing. "Spock means it this time. Or, means it more than he has before." Her brows furrow in sheer pissiness. "Who the hell can say with those two. How many times have they broken up now?" She waves a hand before I can even think to try and count. "Never mind, don't tell me. I don't know, Bones. He's serious, and Jim knows it, and you know what a fatalistic bastard he can be these days."

I grasped the neck of my beer and dropped my head. I knew, all right.

She drains the dregs of her drink, licking the edge of the glass absently with typical total disregard to the effect she might have on the continued circulation of any man in a twenty meter radius.

"I have to go, Len. Keep an eye out- he's making the usual rounds, so he'll be here sooner rather than later."

I nod, finishing my beer in a three swallow chug so I could stand with her, just like Momma taught me.

"Give my regards to Scotty."

"I will." She smiles sadly, and I know she's thinking about the potential dissolution of her own marriage. Scotty's been in and out these five years now, and more out than in of late. Of course, if she'd leave off fucking Jim when he turns up, that might help, but I'd be a hell of a hypocrite to say a goddamn word about that. Besides, there's no man or woman alive who can resist Jim when he's set on something, and Scotty knows that as well as any of us.

She kisses my cheek, a swift impress of warmth and scent, and then she's off, heels clicking on the linoleum.

"Bye, Len. Take care."

"You too, girlie. You too."

\---

 

He’s waiting for me in the kitchen when the mosquitoes finally drive me inside. I’ve waited long past the last audible rumble of Nyota’s car down the lane, watching as the sun pools itself up on the horizon and flattens, sunnyside up, before sinking in a reddened haze of ozone and smog.

 

He’s standing at the sink doing the dishes, cigarette drooping from between his lips as he uses those strong fingers to wipe the smack of Nyota’s lipstick from the rim of a glass. The sleeves of his cotton shirt are rolled up to his elbows, and I catch my lip between my teeth at the way his forearms flex as he manipulates the glass in his hands.

 

“Bones.”

 

“Jim.”

 

No need for excess between us, I always did appreciate that.

 

“He’s leaving me, Bones.”

 

He’s affect completely fucking flat, and I know it’s only a matter of time before that’s shot all to hell, so I wiggle the pack of Spirits out of his pocket and lift a smoke, sliding the pack back to nestle against the curve of his hip as I raise the still-warm cigarette to my mouth and light it.

 

“Is he now.”

 

The first pull is heady and rich, filling up my lungs and drowning me until I exhale in a single chained breath. There’s a small collection of moths banging hopelessly against the ceiling light, and the smoke catches them, making them slow and even more confused than they were before. I watch them mindlessly as they throw themselves again and again against the bulb.

 

“There’s nothing I can do, Bones.”

 

There are no more dishes left in the sink now; they march instead in orderly file through the white plastic dish-drainer, dripping unobtrusively onto my old strawberry print dishtowel. He pulls the washrag absently through his fingers, worrying the loosened edge of hem between an index finger and thumb.

 

“That can’t be true, Jim. Have you talked to him?”

 

Spock’s not an unreasonable man. In fact, in some ways, he’s the Platonic fucking ideal of a reasonable man. Which is not to say that having any sort of emotional conversation with him can ever be anything but a minefield.

 

“No, Bones.” Jim’s voice is still that same flat neutral, and it’s starting to unnerve me. “I _did_ talk to him. That’s what he said. _There’s nothing I can do_.”

 

I close my eyes and fill my mouth with smoke. Maybe if I just wait he’ll be gone, him and his goddamned ridiculous drama, taking up all the space in my tiny kitchen like a whale in a goldfish bowl, sucking up the air like we were back in the vacuum of space.

 

I open my eyes. It hasn’t worked. He’s pushed right up in front of me, toe to toe, his eyes dead and pleading in turns as he slides his damp hands under the hem of my work shirt.

 

“He says our love is a vacuum, Bones.”

 

I snort. That’s awfully goddamn poetic for our Spock, but I can’t look away from Jim’s face even as I grasp his wrists and push his hands off my skin. It’s a useless gesture, and I know it, but I try anyway. Maybe Hume was right, and past behavior doesn’t necessarily predict future outcomes.

 

“He says our love sucks him in to the point that he can’t _see_ , can’t _hear_ , can’t _breathe_.”

 

His hands are back under my shirt, moving faster this time, rising through my chest hair to pinch a nipple and I gasp under my breath. Raise my hand to place on his chest and push, but he doesn’t budge. He’s always been stronger than me, more fit, and even if he weren’t, his will alone has overpowered most of the universe at one point or another. He grips me by the belt and pulls, and it’s either follow him or fall on my face, so I follow, stumbling into the gloom of the short hallway.

 

“Jim. Why the hell do you do this?” I don’t know why I have to ask the stupid question. We both know the answer.

 

“I have to feel something, Bones.” His face is open, raw. “Anything, Bones, I have to feel _anything_.”

 

“It can’t possibly be helping, you know that, right?”

 

“It doesn’t matter, Bones.” I can’t see his face, but I don’t need to. “What’s done is done.”

 

Which doesn’t make a goddamn lick of _sense_ , since this is not yet _fait accompli_ , but he’s got my pants off and is mouthing my balls, so I don’t suppose I much care anymore. Blow jobs are Jim’s way of resetting the world to his parameters, and I always did wonder what good ol’ Freud would say about that, but to each his own, I suppose. I’m certainly not in any position to complain as he slides his tongue around the head of my dick, sucking it into the warm heat of that gorgeous mouth while those strong and dexterous hands map the insides of my thighs.

 

The sex is slow, which is strange for us, and all I can think is that he must be lost in his mind, a thousand miles away as he presses himself into me until I shout, jack-knifing against him as I spasm, letting him push and push and push until he’s spent and limp, laying silent at my side.

 

Spock’s the vacuum, if you ask me, or maybe a black hole, sucking everything that is Jim into his gravitational field.

 

“Nyota said he’s gotten a lawyer. Talking about filing papers.” The words are clear in the dark, flat in the neutrality of absolute denial.

 

“Jim…”

 

“C’est la vie, Bones.” He rolls onto his stomach, the soles of his feet pointing to heaven. “C’est la fucking vie.”


	3. Just Like Thunder

This is how it is. This is how it has been. This is how it will be.

 

He looks like hell, sitting there with his lip all split and oozing, his hair stiffened into spikes with sweat and booze and blood. Makes me think of the day I first met him, cocky as fuck, with snot still staining his collar.

 

What does it say that it’s bailing my fuck-up of a best friend out of jail that gets me all nostalgic?

 

“Boneth.”

 

“Get up off your lazy ass, Jimmy. We’re gonna go for a drive.”

 

On second thought, hell oughta look a sight better than Jim, here. Isn’t the devil supposed to be a handsome, well, devil? Suave and enticing and luring all good maidens to their unknowing doom? Then again, maybe that is an apt description for Jim, cause I’ll be damned if the bruise rising on his cheekbone doesn’t make him look just that much more appealing.

 

Bastard.

 

It’s like the beginning all over again, starting with Spock’s flexing fingers wrapped right around Jim’s lily-white throat and squeezing. Like when they came back from saving the day, and I could count the impress of each knuckle on Jim’s raw cheekbone, could enumerate the fractaled edges of phaser burn on Spock’s shoulder.

 

I knew then, and I know it now; this is how it is. This is how it has been. This is how it will be.

 

Here’s the thing; you live in each others’ pockets as long as we all have, you either learn that you love each other or you get the fuck out. There’s no other way it can be. It’s not like any of us gave informed consent to any of this goddamned three-ring circus, but we put our x on the dotted line all the same when we boarded that silver ship for the second time.

 

It didn’t _need_ to be this way. It’s just… there’s no other way for it to be. When all the possibilities are reduced to a singular point of light, or the gravitational pull of nuclear charisma, _need_ and _want_ become irrelevant. The only applicable verbs are forms of _to be_ ; Is. Was. Are. Will be.

 

I’ll bail him out; Jim knows it as well as I do. Knows it as well as either of us know that freckle right behind Nyota’s ear, or that Scotty speaks Gaelige in his sleep. That Sulu fucking hates roses more than anything, and that that’s exactly why Chekov buys him red ones every Valentine’s.  As well as we know what Spock looks like broken, then given hope.

 

He’ll come with me, and we’ll fuck, just like we always do. The press of hands, the loss of clothes, the urgent rush of blood and friction and fluid. The exhausted heat of release, the salt-sharp scent of sweat rising in the dark.

 

This is how it is. This is how it has been. This is how it will be.

 

Jim will leave at dawn, his eyes shadowed with the rising sun. I’ll sleep till noon, get up, make coffee, and fall asleep in my armchair while the fan does absolutely goddamn nothing to cool the air in the room.

 

At some point, Spock will come back, and he and Jim will turn their radiation inward for a time, splitting the atoms of their personalities in a secure chamber devoid of foreign contaminants, combining and recombining in blinding fission, radio waves rolling away like thunder. 

 

I pass the deputy my credit chit.

 

This is how it is. This is how it has been. This is how it will be.


End file.
